For a writer who "explores the lives of young men in their 20s and 30s", as the blurb puts it, the American author Steve Almond is remarkably good at depicting women. A shame, then, that only one of the 12 stories in this, his debut collection, is told from a female perspective. In "Geek Player, Love Slayer", the unnamed narrator - a 33-year-old newspaper reporter - and her male colleague Brisby identify a new species: the lifeguard of the decade, the geek player.

They wonder how such people came into existence. "Because even two years ago the Systems Manager was this little smudge of a person who frittered on about mainframe systems and was perfectly content to hang with his tech buddies." These days, the computer guy struts around the office "hustling chicks" and coming to the rescue of the "computer fuckups", all of whom worship the carpet he walks on.

The real star here is not the resident geek player, Lance, but the narrator herself, surely the sassiest, randiest female ever to terrorise American fiction. "O please," she says to Lance. "Go ask the wizard for a brain." When he squeezes the bridge of her foot (while fiddling with cables under her desk), she's thinking: "Hey, bright boy: there's a whole calf and thigh where that came from!" Like many an overworked thirtysomething woman, she wonders why she hasn't got kids, why she hasn't got a good man. And why she has fallen for a "smoothie from the Kingdom of Cheese".

But it isn't all hip social satire. "My Life In Heavy Metal" and "Run Away, My Pale Love" both explore ill-fated relationships. "There is a point you reach," concludes the narrator of the latter, "when you are just something bad that happened to someone else."

If you found that sentence a touch sentimental, try this, from "The Pass": "Day after fallen day, these odd delicious moments on which so much depends; unwrapped like papered pears, held close to nose, sniffed, tasted." The whole book is like that: perverse, poetic, odd. Many of Almond's sentences are a little pretentious; some don't seem to make sense, but they always feel right, and - aside, perhaps, from "Geek Player, Love Slayer" - this is more a book of feelings than of meanings. And considering the lack of happy endings, it will leave you feeling quite wonderful.